What is a meaningful brand? And how do you integrate it to your business? In this episode, we asked Paul Campillo, Director of Brand at Typeform to answer all our questions about SaaS branding and hear his powerful advice on how to develop a meaningful vision, mission and values.
From high school dropout to Director of Brand at Typeform, a SaaS platform that lets you create forms, surveys, quizzes, and more, Paul Campillo’s path to success has been anything but typical.
In this episode, we talk about his journey from Typeform’s first marketing hire to his vision about meaningful brands. Paul also talks us through the building blogs behind creating meaningful brands and why branding matters more than ever.
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Quick bio
Name: Paul Campillo
What he does: Head of Brand and Comms at Typeform.
Paul on the web: Twitter | LinkedIn
Episode highlight: Paul’s simple but powerful breakdown of the four elements to help your product have a more meaningful conversation
Top tips from this episode
How do you get found before anyone goes to Google?
Many products think that one way to keep retention rates high is by competing on features, pricing models, and adding more proof on your landing page.
When thinking about one that makes the biggest difference for a company in the future, Paul quotes Rand Fishkin, who says that the most effective and ignored SEO strategy is “to build a brand; It has more search value than its keywords.”
What are the building blocks of meaningful brands?
- Functional benefits – you have to deliver a product that works
- Personal benefits – untapped and unexplored territory for many companies (how do we help someone become who they’re aspiring to be?)
- Collective benefits – what are we doing beyond earning a profit for the world? Can we do more there?
The most underutilized of a copywriting framework: proof
It’s not only about slapping testimonials on a page, or showing a demo, or showing authority through the companies you are working with. It’s seeing what people write unsolicited about your product or your service.
The most underrated place to get copy ideas -> Reddit.
For Paul, the platform is a treasure trove when it comes to swiping copy. Discussions, questions, and how the people in the community write emphasize the importance of breaking down any technical jargon into compelling copy.
Episode Highlights
Transcript excerpts from the interview
On his experience as a first hire in the marketing department:
[10:15] When you’re ignorant, and you’re aware that you’re ignorant, you then do whatever you can to learn. I was reading blogs and trying to understand how other people are doing what they’re doing. And this is all from the marketing side.
You’re still always learning new stuff and trying different things, and you also start to expand. You’re like, “well, what’s the role of customer success and what’s going on over here in the product? And so I had this really horizontal view of the company at its early days that I’ve always carried and grown as we’ve expanded.
On creating hot dog content
[12:00] I coined a term for this at Typeform, and everyone started using it called a hot dog content.
I watched this episode of The Simpsons, and they showed a picture of a hot dog coming together. It’s rat hair and a piece of meat here and a piece of meat there, and they slapped it all together, and they formed a hot dog. So I called that hot dog content because what we tend to do is go to Google, look up certain topics, open up 20 tabs, and we take a little bit of information from everything.
Then we create our little hotdog, and we give it to the world. And it’s nothing new. It’s just a low piece of everything, without any real insight. And we give that to the world to eat. I didn’t think that was cool.
On the need for people to pass down more than knowledge
[16:19] When people leave, all the institutional knowledge is gone. New people come in, and the remaining institutional knowledge building doesn’t get accessed. So what happens? We ended up in the same place like two years later.
We’re so good at passing down knowledge, and we’re so terrible at passing down wisdom. I’m not just talking about teams in a company, but I’m in general in society. That’s a problem that we definitely need to solve.
On selling the brand inside the company
[20:04] We have a lot of workshops with the entire company. Everyone has a shot at this to make sure that we’re on the same page with where we’re trying to go as a company, what we’re trying to do, what we’re trying to build.
It’s very hands-on; it’s doing stuff that doesn’t scale. But it needs to be done. If we tie this back to the brand and how critical culture is to build meaningful brands, it’s everything.
If you don’t get the inside, right, you can forget the outside’s expression; it’s just going to be superficial and shallow. And so you might hear me in every meeting or every other meeting, talking about how we need to get tight farmers, our whole team moving in the same direction. Otherwise, we’re screwed as a brand, like we’re not going to be able to express it to its fullest potential. Everything ties back to that.
Top quotes
[25:11] Okay, how do we transform the product right now so that it’s a meaningful brand?
- Personal: can we make the conversation more personal? Can we make the information exchanged more personalized, so they feel it’s for them?
- Contextual: what’s happening in the environment right now? What data can we pull from the environment to make it more contextual? (e.g., weather, device, the context of the interaction)
- Relevance: if you want to talk about dogs, and I want to talk about cats, that’s not a relevant conversation
- Beautiful: Make sure that whatever you can do in the product represents your best self.
[32:28] I got inspired by something Rand Fishkin said; someone asked him what’s the most effective and ignored SEO strategy. And he says, well, building a brand that has more search volume than its keywords. To me, that was everything that was like, that was confirmation that it’s critical to build something that stands out. And in our view, that’s what it means to build meaningful brands.
[43:50] If your content strategy isn’t centered around the people who matter most to your business, your strategy is off. Those people are your customers and employees.
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